January, 2025

article thumbnail

How to Do a Close Reading Lesson in Any Subject

Cult of Pedagogy

Listen to my interview with Jen Serravallo ( transcript ): Sponsored by Wix Tomorrow and Brisk Teaching This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. If you click these and make a purchase from Amazon, Cult of Pedagogy will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. As I considered how to introduce this post, I started by looking for statistics that could paint a picture of where modern-day students are with their reading skills.

Pedagogy 270
article thumbnail

MIT's Visualizing Cultures: Opening Japan, Opium War

World History Teachers Blog

This MIT site " Visualizing Cultures ," is a great resource for World History and AP World when studying imperialism. The site includes outstanding visual narratives on which curriculum units are based. Most of the curriculum units ask students to analyze various images. Some of the units include the rise and fall of the Canton Trade System and the First Opium War.

Cultures 192
educators

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Top scholar says evidence for special education inclusion is ‘fundamentally flawed’

The Hechinger Report

A trio of researchers argues that it’s unclear where students with disabilities learn the most and recommends that teachers and parents focus first on interventions students need. Credit: Getty images A prominent professor of special education is about to ignite a fierce debate over a tenet of his field, that students with disabilities should be educated as much as possible alongside their peers in general education classrooms, a strategy known as inclusion.

Education 145
article thumbnail

Relationships Are Key to Kids’ Growth — And They’re in Crisis, Expert Says

ED Surge

Education in the 21st century is obsessed with assessing children, attempting to measure every aspect of their intelligence, learning and growth. Yet we are not, according to Isabelle Hau, measuring what matters: relationships. Theres a disconnect between what we know is really critical and then what were paying attention to, says Hau, executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and author of a new book about the essential role of relationships in healthy human development.

article thumbnail

Teaching Nixon

Passion for Social Studies

Students learn about such a wide range of politics in high school history classes. While some courses are about foreign countries, others focus on what is happening in the United States. This means students learn about important leaders and policies that have drastically shaped the United States into the country it is today. For example, teaching Nixon is a crucial aspect of American history due to his leadership, insights, and evolution of politics.

Teaching 130
article thumbnail

The Vanishing Traces of Our Earliest Ancestors in Indonesia

Sapiens

A paleontologist journeys through Indonesias Riau Archipelago in search of Homo erectus remains, but uncovers how environmental devastation has erased much of the regions history. FROM THE AIR, endless rows of palm trees swallowed the topography as we flew over Bintan Island in the South China Sea. On the ground, an occasional fallen palm tree and piles of red palm fruit scattered along the roadsides.

article thumbnail

6 Ed Tech Tools to Try in 2025

Cult of Pedagogy

Listen to this post as a podcast: Sponsored by Alpaca and Brisk Teaching Every January for the last ten years, we have chosen a small collection of tech tools we think are worth checking out. That will be the same this year. But something else will be different: Traditionally, when we put out this list, we do it to coincide with the release of our annual Teacher’s Guide to Tech.

Pedagogy 210

More Trending

article thumbnail

One state tried algebra for all eighth graders. It hasn’t gone well

The Hechinger Report

This story about eighth grade algebra was produced by The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. BRAHAM, Minn. It was fourth-period Basic Algebra 8 class on a gray October morning at Braham Area High School. Teacher Rick Riccio had assigned an exercise on converting large integers to scientific notation, but fifteen minutes in, some students had lost focus.

article thumbnail

Los Angeles Wildfires Are NOT a Natural Disaster

Zinn Education Project

The climate crisis is not in some distant future. It is being felt around the world with heatwaves, floods, and most dramatically with the wildfires in Southern California. Our hearts go out to the residents who face the tragic loss of lives, homes, and entire communities. #TeachClimateJustice : Invite students to listen to news about the fires and come up with their own terms for the disaster, such as fossil-fueled disaster or climate change disaster.

Teaching 131
article thumbnail

The Week That Was In 234

Moler's Musing

This week in 8th-grade social studies, we brought history to life with engaging EduProtocols that helped students dive deep into the Early Republic and key moments like the Whiskey Rebellion. From Sketch and Tell-O activities that broke down complex ideas to Progressive Sketch and Tell timelines that visualized historical events, we kept creativity at the forefront.

article thumbnail

Cultivating Dragon Fruit’s Political Power in Ecuador

Sapiens

In the Ecuadorian Amazon, an anthropologist explores how the Shuar people are betting on dragon fruit cultivation to reclaim economic autonomy and political sovereignty. This article was originally published at YES! Magazine and has been republished under Creative Commons. This is a magnificent fruit but is difficult to care for, says Juan Chamik as he stands on a hill on his land, looking over the rainforest.

Economics 111
article thumbnail

27 Simple Ways To Check For Understanding

TeachThought

Whether you're using data to personalize learning or refine curriculum, the ability to easily check for understanding is critical to your teaching.

Teaching 322
article thumbnail

Can ‘Math Therapists’ Make a Dent In America’s Declining Math Performance?

ED Surge

Danielle Robinson desperately wants to help math teachers, but its a tough job. An instructional coach for K-5 math teachers in Milwaukee Public Schools in Wisconsin, Robinson can find herself zipping around several of the schools she works with in the city to assist teachers, give workshops or try to help vice principals grasp the nuances of math instruction.

article thumbnail

A dismal report card in math and reading

The Hechinger Report

The kids are not bouncing back. The results of a major national test released Wednesday showed that in 2024, reading and math skills of fourth and eighth grade students were still significantly below those of students in 2019, the last administration of the test before the pandemic. In reading, students slid below the devastatingly low achievement levels of 2022, which many educators had hoped would be a nadir.

article thumbnail

WHN Annual Conference 2025, Call for Papers

Women's History Network

First Call for Papers Womens History Network 33rd Annual Conference Online via Zoom Thursday 4 & Friday 5 September 2025 Hidden in Plain Sight: Women in Archives, Libraries, Museums and Personal Collections.

Archiving 140
article thumbnail

The Week That Was In 234

Moler's Musing

Coming back from winter break, we hit the ground running with the principles of the Constitution. The transition wasnt easysnow delays and uneven class times on Wednesday threw off our rhythm, and the textbooks overwhelming vocabulary and dense content didnt help. After some reflection and collaboration with a trusted colleague, I decided to adjust my approach.

article thumbnail

Translation Notes

Sapiens

A translators notes are refashioned into a poem calling for justice for Indigenous peoples in the Philippines displaced by a megadam. Translation Notes is part of the collection Poets Resist, Refuse, and Find a Way Through. Read the introduction to the collection here. In November 2023 , Ian Fry , the first U.N. Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights, met with stakeholders in the Philippines to report on the status of the country regarding environmental and human rights protectio

article thumbnail

Vietnam War

Passion for Social Studies

The Vietnam War was a pivotal event in world history. It shaped global politics, the nature of warfare, and international relations. So, it is essential that students understand its causes and impacts on the United States. Thankfully, the Vietnam War Lesson and Recent US History Unit are ready to make learning meaningful and planning a breeze! The Importance of Teaching about the Vietnam War There are many reasons why students must develop a strong understanding of the Vietnam War.

article thumbnail

Art Saved My Life When I Was a Student. Now, It's Helping My Multilingual Learners.

ED Surge

Earlier this month at Truesdell Elementary, in the last five minutes of one of my classes, I called for my students' attention. Class, class! I called. Yes, yes, they responded in unison. I have a recognition to make. I held up one of my fourth grade students perspective drawings and projected it for the class to see. His carefully rendered parallel, vertical and diagonal lines converging at the vanishing point created a stunning visual.

K-12 109
article thumbnail

Writing notes instead of typing pits scholars against each other

The Hechinger Report

Imagine youre a student in high school or college. Class is about to start. You are faced with a notable dilemma: Should you whip out a notebook or a laptop to take notes? The answer is not so simple. A year ago, paper and pen seemed to be the winner when the journal Frontiers in Psychology published a Norwegian study that documented how different areas of the brain were communicating more frequently when students were writing by hand.

article thumbnail

EduProtocols & Gifted Students

HistoryRewriter

Working with gifted students can be challenging and time-consuming. Creating tiered assignments that offer varying levels of rigor is not easy. Allowing students to work at their own pace can become a complicated juggling act. On Thursday, January 16, 2025 at 9 pm ET/6PT Adam and I welcome Kelly Bellar to The Social Studies Show to talk about using EduProtocols with Gifted Students.

article thumbnail

Tracing Ancient Roots: How Iron Age Britain Centered on Women

Anthropology.net

In a quiet corner of Dorset, a burial site has rewritten what we know about Iron Age Britain. By sequencing DNA from 50 individuals interred over centuries, researchers discovered 1 a striking social structure: women, not men, were at the heart of these communities. Excavating a Late Iron Age Durotriges burial at Winterborne Kingston. Credit: Miles Russell/Bournemouth University A study led by Dr.

Ancestry 105
article thumbnail

Living With Parakeets and Other Migrants

Sapiens

Amsterdam, like other European cities, hosts growing populations of non-native parakeets. An anthropologist unpacks what shifting attitudes toward these birds reveal about humans. When I came to Amsterdam as a graduate student in 2012, I was surprised to find the citys parks teeming with vibrant green feathers, red beaks, and bluish tails. The birds, which looked to me like parrots, were hard to miss.

Museum 128
article thumbnail

CFP: Domesticated? Female Animals and Animalized Women in the Greek and Roman Worlds

Society for Classical Studies

CFP: Domesticated? Female Animals and Animalized Women in the Greek and Roman Worlds kskordal Mon, 01/13/2025 - 15:13 Image Domesticated? Female Animals and Animalized Women in the Greek and Roman Worlds or, La Belle et la Bte? Female Beasts and Bestial Women Keynote Speaker: Sian Lewis, School of Classics, University of St. Andrews Proposers: Karen Klaiber Hersch, Department of Greek and Roman Classics, Temple University ( khersch@temple.edu ) Kathryn Simonsen, Department of Classics, Memorial

article thumbnail

How Wicked Taught Me to Defy Gravity — One Student at a Time

ED Surge

The lights dimmed, and the audience fell silent. It was a cold January afternoon in 2007, and I was sitting in a crowded auditorium in Providence, Rhode Island, nervously thinking about the week ahead. In just a few days, Id travel across the world and step into a classroom for the first time as a student teachera dream years in the making that suddenly felt overwhelming.

Teaching 113
article thumbnail

A researcher said the evidence on special education inclusion is flawed. Readers weighed in

The Hechinger Report

I am always happy when my work generates a public discussion. That happened after a January column I wrote about a prominent scholars critique of the evidence for including children with disabilities in general education classrooms. Advocates, parents and teachers argued for inclusion, against inclusion and for some hybrid of the two. The director of education at the Learning Disabilities Association of America weighed in, as did the commissioner of special education research at the U.S.

Research 137
article thumbnail

Mapped: How Europe’s wealth has shifted since 1900

Strange Maps

Prosperity is not a given, and neither is poverty. As these maps show, rich regions can lose their wealth, and poor places can turn affluent. While they dont explain the ebbs and flows of fortune, these maps do provide a fascinating, granular view of where those fortunes rose and fell in Europe, in just over a century. Both maps show regional GDPs relative to the European average.

article thumbnail

Echoes of the Past: Understanding Ancient Diets at Franchthi Cave

Anthropology.net

An Ancient Cave with Modern Questions Franchthi Cave, nestled in the Peloponnesian peninsula of Greece, has been a silent witness to 40,000 years of human history. It serves as a critical archaeological site for understanding the transition from Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to Neolithic agriculturalists. A recent study published in PLOS ONE 1 takes a groundbreaking approach to unraveling the dietary patterns of its inhabitants, using compound-specific stable isotope analysis (CSIA) to bring clari

article thumbnail

Your Vote Defends Teaching People’s History

Zinn Education Project

It is more important than ever for students today to learn peoples history a history that looks honestly at the roots of inequality and shares lessons about how people can organize to make the world a better place. But truth telling in the classroom is under threat by right wing legislators. Lawmakers are trying to restrict teaching honestly about U.S. history.

History 98
article thumbnail

The Meiji Revolution: Excellent Clip from the Pacific Century

World History Teachers Blog

Here is an excellent 14-minute clip about the Meiji Revolution from the Pacific Century, the 1992 PBS 10-part documentary about the rise of the Pacific Rim. Part two, from which the attached clip comes, is about the Meiji Revolution. It is dated but still does a good job. It begins in 1868 when Mutsuhito became the Meiji Emperor.

214
214
article thumbnail

Why ‘Brain Rot’ Can Hurt Learning — and How One District Is Kicking It Out of School

ED Surge

I was recently sitting with my friends 9-year-old son, Guillermo, as he teed up a YouTube video on the TV. Id wanted to get a kids perspective on brain rot, Oxford University Press 2024 word of the year that describes both low-quality video content and what seemingly happens to the mind after watching too much of it. Naturally, I sought out someone with on-the-ground experience.

K-12 109
article thumbnail

Quitting jobs to qualify for child care

The Hechinger Report

The first time I talked to Amy Lee Funes, our conversation left me stunned. In spite of the fact that she earned only $35,000 a year and lived in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Funes made too much to qualify for public assistance paying for child care. Her only option was to take a pay cut, a city official told her in late 2019. Funes, who had recently moved far away from her mother (a free source of child care) to escape an abusive relationship, desperately needed child care.

K-12 128
article thumbnail

Surrounding™ Carrollton

Life and Landscapes

SURROUNDING CARROLLTON Surrounded by the two rivers. The Ohio River, at the mouth of another long tributary that Native Americans called “Kentucke.” A name for that river of water that drained the Eastern Mountains of their common wealth and provided access to her treasures. The one that gave our Commonwealth its name. I sit between the two rivers in Carrollton’s “Point Park,” celebrating this famous geographic location.

Museum 98
article thumbnail

East Meets West: Avar Society’s Genetic Patchwork in Early Medieval Austria

Anthropology.net

In the 8th century CE, the Avars—an enigmatic group with roots in the East Asian steppes—settled in Central Europe, weaving a tapestry of cultural cohesion amid genetic diversity. New research, published in Nature 1 by an international team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, delves into the lives of two neighboring Avar communities in Lower Austria.

article thumbnail

Airborne lead pollution may have cost ancient Romans 3 IQ points

Strange Maps

Why didnt the Romans invent the steam engine, electricity, or the airplane? Perhaps because they were 3 IQ points less clever than they could have been. The culprit: lead pollution but not of the kind we already knew about. Odd and violent behavior The Romans drank tap water from lead pipes, prepared and ate their food on lead-containing kitchenware, used lead in their cosmetics, and even sweetened and preserved their wine with lead acetate.

History 74
article thumbnail

Opium Wars: CNN Millenium & The Story of China

World History Teachers Blog

Here are two clips about the Opium Wars. One is from CNN Millenium , which I often show my students and the other is from Micheal Wood in The Story of China. Both are short, about 8 to 10 minutes. In the CNN Millenim video, the Opium War starts at 28.49 and runs to 36.50. The clip from The Story of China is eight minutes long.

206
206
article thumbnail

As Apprenticeships Expand in Early Childhood, These States Are Training the Field’s Future Leaders

ED Surge

A typical career trajectory in early care and education might follow like this: start as an assistant teacher in a classroom, eventually gain the experience to move up to lead teacher, and if youre ambitious and able, one day become the assistant director, director or even owner of a program. On paper, it seems reasonable. Each role, over time, equips the educator to step into the next one, right?